STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 1 29 



LEGISLATION FOR PURE INSECTICIDES. 

 By Professor E. D. Sanderson, Durham, N. H. 



I want to speak a few minutes about the need for insecticide 

 and fungicide -control, and tr}- to bring before you a measure 

 \vhich is now before Congress, which I think will have the sup- 

 port of this Association as well as that of all the fruit growers 

 and agricultural associations of the country. I presume that 

 every once in a while you have met one of your neighbors who 

 has said that he put on a couple of pounds of Paris green for 

 the potato bugs and that it didn't kill a bug. I run across that 

 once in a while. I think a good deal of this is due more to the 

 man than to the Paris green ; but we do every once in a while 

 find poor Paris green on the market, although from the fact 

 that many states have legislation on Paris green and the manu- 

 facturers have to sell in these states, it has protected the other 

 states which have no laws. 



Now we have also a great many insecticides which we call 

 proprietary^ insecticides, all sorts and kinds, which are claimed 

 to kill everything, and fertiUze the land and do everything else. 

 We have had a host of these compounds, and we experiment 

 station men get dozens of them every year to test, to show that 

 they are good things, so that we can advise the farmers accord- 

 ingly. Once in a while we get a good thing but about nine-tenths 

 of them are bugbears and nuisances and we get very tired of 

 testing out these quack remedies which prove to be of very little 

 value, or else are sold at exorbitant prices. Of course we do 

 iind some good things now and then. To make this work easier 

 our association of economic entomologists appointed a committee 

 to see if we could not in some way supervise the testing of these 

 things and avoid a lot of that work, and as we got to work on 

 the proposition we found the first thing needed was a chemi- 

 cal analysis of these insecticides. We needed someway whereby 

 they could be analyzed and we could tell in that way whether 

 there was anything of value in them or not. And we concluded 

 after considering the matter for some time that if all of these 

 insecticides were analyzed, the analysis on the package would 

 speak for itself and that many of our fmit growers and farmers 



